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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
Let us now see what modern Science has to say on the subject. Like some of the Hindu Realists, it also reduces the universe to two factors, but calls them matter and force. Under the head of matter come all the substances, whether nebulous, gaseous, liquid or solid, while force includes the various forms of energy, such as light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, and the like. It is now held that all manifestations of existence and life are caused by evolution from these two factors. Both matter and force are indestructible ; in other words, the sum total of each is a fixed quantity which it is not possible to add to, or subtract from. The force (a distinction is recognised between this term and energy; for, while force inheres in, and cannot be separated from the atoms of weighable matter, energy passes from atom to atom, and from mass to mass, its vehicle being the unweighable ethereal medium, which, it is assumed, fills the space between bodies and between particles of bodies) bound up in each atom, acting as affinity, combines atoms into molecules ; acting as cohesion, it unites the molecules into masses; and acting as gravitation, it draws the masses towards their several centres of gravity. The evolution of the organic from the inorganic substance is similarly explained ; for the difference between the most complex inorganic thing and the lowest form of organism is considered to lie merely in the arrangement of the molecules of matter composing them. In its lowest form the living germ is apparently lifeless, and so utterly devoid of structure that it is only by courtesy that one can be induced to call it an organism. According to the leading authorities on modern Science,
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